Aligning Developmental and Processing Accounts of Implicit and Statistical Learning.

Caroline F Rowland,Michelle S Peter

doi:10.1111/tops.12396

Abstract

A long‐standing question in child language research concerns how children achieve mature syntactic knowledge in the face of a complex linguistic environment. A widely accepted view is that this process involves extracting distributional regularities from the environment in a manner that is incidental and happens, for the most part, without the learner's awareness. In this way, the debate speaks to two associated but separate literatures in language acquisition: statistical learning and implicit learning. Both fields have explored this issue in some depth but, at present, neither the results from the infant studies used by the statistical learning literature nor the artificial grammar learning tasks studies from the implicit learning literature can be used to fully explain how children's syntax becomes adult‐like. In this work, we consider an alternative explanation—that children use error‐based learning to become mature syntax users. We discuss this proposal in the light of the behavioral findings from structural priming studies and the computational findings from Chang, Dell, and Bock's (2006) dual‐path model, which incorporates properties from both statistical and implicit learning, and offers an explanation for syntax learning and structural priming using a common error‐based learning mechanism. We then turn our attention to future directions for the field, here suggesting how structural priming might inform the statistical learning and implicit learning literature on the nature of the learning mechanism.

Highlights

To form grammatical utterances, children must assign words to the different syntactic categories required by their language and combine these categories according to particular syntactic rules to convey meaning
Neither the results from the infant studies used by the statistical learning literature nor the artificial grammar learning tasks (AGL) studies used by the implicit learning literature can, at present, be used to fully explain how children’s syntax becomes adult-like
The dual-path model offers an explanation for both syntax learning and structural priming effects using a common mechanism, considers the role of semantics in the formation of abstract syntactic knowledge, and develops this knowledge by tracking statistical regularities in real speech as opposed to the surface structure of an artificial language

Summary

Introduction

To form grammatical utterances, children must assign words to the different syntactic categories required by their language and combine these categories according to particular syntactic rules to convey meaning. Among multiple other rules, they must learn the grammatical marking of semantic roles such as agent and patient, as well as how to map these semantic roles onto syntactic positions (e.g., subject and object) They need to learn that, in some languages, altering word order can have semantic consequences (e.g., The girl pushed the boy means something different from The boy pushed the girl), and that not all verbs can be used in the same way (e.g., fight can be used both intransitively [The boy fought] and transitively [The boy fought his opponent], but swim cannot [The boy swam] vs [*The boy swam his opponent]). Research on syntax acquisition can inform, and be informed by, two associated but separate literatures: statistical learning and implicit learning

Statistical learning and implicit learning

Error-based implicit learning as a mechanism for syntax acquisition